Development

Our development team has presented at conferences across the country, and has nearly 15 years of web technology development experience.

High Performance APIs in Ruby using ActiveRecord and Goliath

Presented at RailsConf 2015

We had a real-time API in Rails that needed much lower latency and massive throughput. We wanted to preserve our investment in business logic inside ActiveRecord models while scaling up to 1000X throughput and cutting latency in half. Conventional wisdom would say this was impossible in Ruby, but we succeeded and actually surpassed our expectations. We'll discuss how we did it, using Event-Machine for the reactor pattern, Synchrony to avoid callback hell and to make testing easy, Goliath as the non-blocking web server, and sharding across many cooperative processes.

2015

High Performance APIs in Ruby using ActiveRecord and Goliath

We spent two years developing extremely high-performance and high-availability APIs in Ruby, creating a solution that was over 10,000x faster than the existing solution. We were invited to share our work with the CTO of Invoca at RailsColf 2015.

2015

AZ::Ruby - Phoenix, AZ

Event-driven Robotics in Ruby

Reactive, event-drive robotics are one of the most comment types of passive consumer electronics. We talked about developing these systems in Ruby and C, circuitry applications, and presented examples of our work.

2014

Invoca - Santa Barbara, CA

Velocity and Volatility

An important part of tracking the progress of a project is the velocity, the amount of work we complete each day. Just as important is a projects volatility, the standard deviation of our velocity across many sprints. We presented on tracking volatility, best practices for making acurrate estimates, and solutions to problems that have arisen in previous projects.

2014

Invoca - Santa Barbara, CA

AREL

As Ruby on Rails developers, we spend a lot of time trying to abstract the way we query our databases. However, sometimes we just have to fall back to direct SQL queries, be it due to performance needs or complexity of the dataset. SQL however is can be brittle, difficult to understand, and difficult to test. We discussed AREL, a Ruby DSL, that is much easier to understand and translates directly to SQL.

2013

Webinar

Pretty Good Privacy (GPG) and Tor

Privacy on the internet can be complicated, but not with a good understanding of the available toolset. We shared our experience protecting client and personal data with the GNU toolset, and how to access the internet securely and privately using the Onion network. We also showed how to contribute to the Tor network, and demoed Tor Atlas showing our own nodes.

2012

Procore - Carpenteria, CA

Testing Best Practices

Test Driven Development (TDD) is accepted as standard protocol in Ruby on Rails development. We presented on testing best-practices, patterns, and mitigable pitfalls.

rainmade is a Seattle web development and software agency with focuses on website design, software development, brand identity, free stock photography, and robotics.